At a private dinner Friday night, Emil Michael, Uber’s senior vice president of business, suggested that the company should hire a team of journalists and opposition researchers to counter bad press and even attack members of the media that criticize the company.

Michael, who previously worked for Klout, the website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank users according to online social influence, suggested spending “a million dollars” on this team, which would look into “your personal lives, your families.” Michael made the statements in front of a crowd of influential New Yorkers at Manhattan’s Waverly Inn last week.

Michael specifically mentioned that such a plan could be used to spread personal details about the life of Sarah Lacy, the editor-in-chief of PandoDaily, a Silicon Valley website whose coverage of Uber has been far from positive.

California has enacted a historic law that forces the state’s colleges to adopt a policy of unambiguous, affirmative consent by students engaged in sexual activity.

State lawmakers approved the so-called “Yes Means Yes” law last month, and Governor Jerry Brown signed it Sunday. The state is the first to pass a law that makes affirmative consent central to school sexual assault policies.

“I don’t think there are words to describe how monumental this is for survivors of sexual assault — female, male or otherwise,” Savannah Badalich, a student at University of California, Los Angles (UCLA) and the founder of the group 7,000 in Solidarity, told VICE News.

Undercover police operations run the gamut from Miami Vice-style raids to phone tapping á la The Wire, but last week Facebook told law enforcement agencies that the social media site will not be an option for officers looking to carry out covert operations.

The company reprimanded the Drug Enforcement Administration for creating a fake profile using a real person’s information and personal photos to assist in an “undercover” sting investigation, saying that they found the activity “deeply troubling.”

Facebook’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, sent a letter to the agency on October 17 informing them that “the DEA’s deceptive actions violate the terms and policies that govern the use of the Facebook service and undermine the trust in the Facebook community.”

No matter how hard he tries, Nemer, a 22-year-old Syrian immigrant living in New Jersey, cannot shake the vision from his mind: 60 people huddled in a tin cell made for 10 out in the Syrian desert. They take it in turns to sleep on the floor. At night the desert is so cold the metal is like ice; by morning the prison is an oven.

This was the fate of a friend jailed for 18 months for publishing an anti-regime poem on Facebook. ‘Like this they torture you for 24 hours,’ says Nemer (who is using a pseudonym out of concern for his family’s safety). ‘But when a friend calls me to say, “Just forget about Syria, forget about going back,” it’s like pulling one of my nerves. It’s like holding my heart and taking it out of my body to tell me I’m not going back to Syria.’

Delama Georges lives one stop from the end of the No. 2 train line in Brooklyn, right next to Holy Cross Cemetery. His proximity to so much death did not bother him until Nov. 9, 2011, when he learned that both his parents contracted cholera during a visit to his sister in Haiti. While Georges’ mother lay in a coma, brought on by dehydration from violent vomiting and diarrhea, his father died, joining more than 8,500 Haitians who died in the epidemic, which began four years ago this month.

Winter Storm Juno began to descend on north-eastern America and several US states declared states of emergency as hurricane-force winds and more than 90cm (36in) of snow was expected. With all non-emergency vehicles banned on New York City’s roads after 23:00 local time, 6,500 flights in and out of airports along the East Coast cancelled and schools and businesses stopping early on Monday night, what was there left to do for all those trapped inside?

Albert Podell was an editor for Playboy and other men’s adventure magazines in the 1960s. He commissioned travel stories from others until one day, he decided to embark on an expedition himself, and he’s never looked back. Fifty years later he is one of the few who can say they’ve visited every country in the world.

For Podell, it began on a car trip, which at the time broke the record for the longest route around the world. Visiting all the world’s countries wasn’t easy: war, revolution and the break-up of the Soviet Union were all sizeable obstacles that extended his mission.

Now he’s written a book, Around the World in Fifty Years, about his exploits, from eating live monkey brain in Hong Kong to parking his land rover in the middle of a minefield in Morocco.

Labour Day 2004. Columbia University’s green laws shimmer in the heady heat. David Banks, 51, looks sharp if a little tired; he has been on the Ivy League campus for four hours already. He steps outside, away from the assorted crowd of celebrities, suited men and parents to speak on the phone with a member of his staff. “Are they en route?” he asks concerned. Ten minutes later the matriculating class of 2004 have arrived. The sound of “America, The Beautiful” waltzes lazily from under the fingers of the pianist as 100 men file importantly into the hall. Next to each distinguished man is a fourteen year-old black boy from the Bronx. This isn’t any ordinary matriculation and these students not your typical Columbia freshmen.